Ian Leslie – UK Based Authorhttp://ian-leslie.com
Mon, 31 Jul 2017 21:21:00 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.1http://ian-leslie.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/cropped-site-icon-32x32.pngIan Leslie – UK Based Authorhttp://ian-leslie.com
3232Watch While It Lasts: Our Golden Age of Televisionhttp://ian-leslie.com/watch-while-it-lasts-our-golden-age-of-television/
Tue, 25 Jul 2017 08:23:35 +0000http://ian-leslie.com/?p=1095For David Chase, HBO was the last port of call. He had spent the previous year shopping his idea for a new drama series to the big broadcasters. One by one, they passed. Fox wanted simpler storylines. CBS asked why the main character had to be in therapy. ABC said there was too much swearing. All of them found it hard to imagine audiences warming to the show’s protagonist, a surly gangster called Tony Soprano.

HBO, a cable network, had less money, fewer viewers and lower prestige than the broadcasters but was willing to take a risk on The Sopranos. Its executives were unsure about giving the show’s creator the control he sought over the project, however — until HBO’s key decision-maker, Chris Albrecht, agreed to hear Chase out in person. “He talked about his vision,” Albrecht told the writer Brett Martin. “By the time he was finished, I thought, ‘Wow.’”

]]>The Scientist Who Make Apps Addictivehttp://ian-leslie.com/minimalist-patterns-delicate-and-subtle-motion/
Thu, 03 Nov 2016 08:11:47 +0000http://writer.ancorathemes.com/?p=5In 1930, a psychologist at Harvard University called B.F. Skinner made a box and placed a hungry rat inside it. The box had a lever on one side. As the rat moved about it would accidentally knock the lever and, when it did so, a food pellet would drop into the box. After a rat had been put in the box a few times, it learned to go straight to the lever and press it: the reward reinforced the behaviour. Skinner proposed that the same principle applied to any “operant”, rat or man. He called his device the “operant conditioning chamber”. It became known as the Skinner box.

Skinner was the most prominent exponent of a school of psychology called behaviourism, the premise of which was that human behaviour is best understood as a function of incentives and rewards. Let’s not get distracted by the nebulous and impossible to observe stuff of thoughts and feelings, said the behaviourists, but focus simply on how the operant’s environment shapes what it does. Understand the box and you understand the behaviour. Design the right box and you can control behaviour.

Skinner turned out to be the last of the pure behaviourists. From the late 1950s onwards, a new generation of scholars redirected the field of psychology back towards internal mental processes, like memory and emotion. But behaviourism never went away completely, and in recent years it has re-emerged in a new form, as an applied discipline deployed by businesses and governments to influence the choices you make every day: what you buy, who you talk to, what you do at work. Its practitioners are particularly interested in how the digital interface – the box in which we spend most of our time today – can shape human decisions. The name of this young discipline is “behaviour design”. Its founding father is B.J. Fogg.

]]>The Sugar Conspiracyhttp://ian-leslie.com/where-technologies-meet-nature-amazing-photoshoot/
Thu, 07 Apr 2016 15:25:27 +0000http://writer.ancorathemes.com/?p=58Robert Lustig is a paediatric endocrinologist at the University of California who specialises in the treatment of childhood obesity. A 90-minute talk he gave in 2009, titled Sugar: The Bitter Truth, has now been viewed more than six million times on YouTube. In it, Lustig argues forcefully that fructose, a form of sugar ubiquitous in modern diets, is a “poison” culpable for America’s obesity epidemic.

A year or so before the video was posted, Lustig gave a similar talk to a conference of biochemists in Adelaide, Australia. Afterwards, a scientist in the audience approached him. Surely, the man said, you’ve read Yudkin. Lustig shook his head. John Yudkin, said the scientist, was a British professor of nutrition who had sounded the alarm on sugar back in 1972, in a book called Pure, White, and Deadly.

“If only a small fraction of what we know about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive,” wrote Yudkin, “that material would promptly be banned.” The book did well, but Yudkin paid a high price for it. Prominent nutritionists combined with the food industry to destroy his reputation, and his career never recovered. He died, in 1995, a disappointed, largely forgotten man.

Perhaps the Australian scientist intended a friendly warning. Lustig was certainly putting his academic reputation at risk when he embarked on a high-profile campaign against sugar. But, unlike Yudkin, Lustig is backed by a prevailing wind. We read almost every week of new research into the deleterious effects of sugar on our bodies. In the US, the latest edition of the government’s official dietary guidelines includes a cap on sugar consumption. In the UK, the chancellor George Osborne has announced a new tax on sugary drinks. Sugar has become dietary enemy number one.

]]>The Data or The Hunchhttp://ian-leslie.com/never-been-much-of-a-reader-until-this-book/
Sat, 15 Aug 2015 15:18:49 +0000http://writer.ancorathemes.com/?p=52JOHN HAMMOND WAS a boy of ten when he fell in love with the new music called jazz. Rather than heading home after school to his family’s mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he would jump on an uptown bus and deposit himself, 30 blocks away, in a different world. The world he left behind was monied, white, sedate; the one to which he travelled was poor, black and popping with energy. To John Hammond, it felt like real life. The shop-owners and doormen of Harlem got used to the sight of the skinny white kid in a blue blazer and peaked cap, riffling through records in music stores, flashing a toothy grin at every-one he encountered.

This was the early 1920s. By 1930, Harlem had usurped the South Side of Chicago as the prime destination for America’s jazz and blues musicians. At venues like the Lafayette, Big John’s Gin Mill, Minton’s and the Cotton Club, players and fans would drink, flirt, smoke and play. Hammond was still making the trip uptown, only now they let him into the clubs. In his button-down shirt and tie, he cut an incongruous figure. But he was friendly with dozens of black musicians and club-owners who knew that this lemonade-sipping young white man loved the same music they did and knew all about it.

]]>How the Mad Men Lost the Plothttp://ian-leslie.com/how-to-start-writing/
Thu, 06 Aug 2015 15:21:28 +0000http://writer.ancorathemes.com/?p=55The arrival of Facebook and Twitter appeared to threaten the advertising industry’s very existence. So what happened next? Even admen have souls, and some of them are enduring dark nights. Jeff Goodby is co-chairman of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, a San Francisco advertising agency responsible for some of the most famous campaigns of the 1990s, including ones for Nike and Budweiser. On his return from this year’s annual ad industry awards festival at Cannes in June, Goodby wrote a rueful piece for The Wall Street Journal. In the past, he said, the only true measure of success was whether the public knew and cared about your work. “You could get into a cab and find out, in a mile or two, whether you mattered in life, just by asking the driver.” Now, “No one knows what we do any more.”

]]>The Revolution That Could Change the Way Your Child is Taughthttp://ian-leslie.com/the-revolution-that-could-change-the-way-your-child-is-taught/
Thu, 19 Mar 2015 22:05:43 +0000http://ianleslie.afldevserver.com/?p=992The video does not seem remarkable on first viewing. A title informs us that we are watching Ashley Hinton, a teacher at Vailsburg Elementary, a school in Newark, New Jersey. Hinton, a blonde woman in a colourful silk scarf, stands before a class of eight- and nine-year-old boys and girls, almost all of whom are African-American. “What might a character be feeling in a story?” she asks. She repeats the question, before engaging her pupils in a high-tempo conversation about what it is like to read a book and why authors write them, as she moves smartly around her classroom.

On an October morning last year, I watched Doug Lemov play this video to a room full of teachers in the hall of an inner-London school. Many had brought their copy of Lemov’s book, Teach Like a Champion, which in the last five years has passed through the hands of thousands of teachers and infiltrated hundreds of staffrooms. To my eyes, the video of Hinton’s lesson was a glimpse into the classroom of an energetic and likable teacher, and pleasing enough. After leading a brief discussion, Lemov played it again, and then a third time.

]]>CURIOUShttp://ian-leslie.com/curious-us-ca/
Fri, 11 Jul 2014 17:38:25 +0000http://ian-leslie.com/?p=304
]]>Why the Mona Lisa Stands Outhttp://ian-leslie.com/why-the-mona-list-stands-out/
Wed, 04 Jun 2014 22:09:27 +0000http://ianleslie.afldevserver.com/?p=998IN 1993 A PSYCHOLOGIST, James Cutting, visited the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to see Renoir’s picture of Parisians at play, “Bal du Moulin de la Galette”, considered one of the greatest works of impressionism. Instead, he found himself magnetically drawn to a painting in the next room: an enchanting, mysterious view of snow on Parisian rooftops. He had never seen it before, nor heard of its creator, Gustave Caillebotte.

That was what got him thinking.
Have you ever fallen for a novel and been amazed not to find it on lists of great books? Or walked around a sculpture renowned as a classic, struggling to see what the fuss is about? If so, you’ve probably pondered the question Cutting asked himself that day: how does a work of art come to be considered great?

]]>How mistakes can save lives: one man’s mission to revolutionise the NHShttp://ian-leslie.com/how-mistakes-can-save-lives-one-mans-mission-to-revolutionise-the-nhs/
Wed, 04 Jun 2014 22:08:10 +0000http://ianleslie.afldevserver.com/?p=995Martin Bromiley is a modest man with an immodest ambition: to change the way medicine is practised in the UK.

I first met him in a Birmingham hotel, at a meeting of the Clinical Human Factors Group, or CHFG. Hospital chief executives, senior surgeons, experienced nurses and influential medical researchers met, debated and mingled. Keynote speakers included the former chief medical officer for England Sir Liam Donaldson. In the corridors and meeting rooms, rising above the NHS jargon and acronyms and low-level grumbling about government reforms, there floated a tangible sense of purpose and optimism. This was a meeting of believers.

A slow transformation in the way health care works is finally gaining traction. So far, it has gone largely unnoticed by the media or the public because it hasn’t been the result of government edict or executive order. But as Suren Arul, a consultant paediatric surgeon at Birmingham Children’s Hospital put it to me: “We are undergoing a quiet revolution and Martin Bromiley will, one day, be recognised as the man who showed us the way.”

]]>42 Reflections On the Meaning of Lifehttp://ian-leslie.com/42-reflections-on-the-meaning-of-life-the-universe-and-everything/
Wed, 19 Feb 2014 22:11:42 +0000http://ianleslie.afldevserver.com/?p=1001I was counting on my 42nd birthday to enlighten me about life, the universe and everything. Or anything. But until that happens, this is all I’ve got.
People say age is just a number, and I suppose that’s true, but it’s a number that tells you roughly how far you are from death.
On a wall at home I have a New Yorker cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan. Two cows are in a field and one is saying to the other, “I suppose if I’m really honest with myself I’m not totally fine about being slaughtered.